Moto Z2 Play First Impressions

Lenovo-owned Motorola recently launched the Moto Z2 Play in India. The phone it replaces, the Moto Z Play (Review), was quite popular for offering brilliant battery life and good performance. Priced at Rs 27,999 the new Moto Z2 Play improves on the hardware of its predecessor and gets a sleeker design, but most importantly, it supports all Moto Mods made till date. We got to spend some time with the new Moto Z2 Play at its launch, and here are our first impressions of the device.

Moto Z2 Play design

The design of the Moto Z2 Play is quite similar to that of the Z Play, and this has a lot to do with the Moto Mods ecosystem. To ensure that the Mods launched last year are compatible with the new phone, Moto had to retain the same height and width, with the connector pins in the same location. The only way this phone could change was its thickness, and Motorola has gone ahead and done exactly that by shaving a millimeter off it. The original Moto Z Play was 6.99 mm thick while the Moto Z2 Play is slimmer at 5.99mm. This has resulted in a hit to the battery capacity, which is now down from 3510mAh to 3000mAh. On the other hand, one positive effect is that the new phone weighs 145g, 20g less than the Z Play.

The front of the Moto Z2 Play sports a 5.5-inch Super Amoled display with a resolution of 1080x1920 pixels and Corning Gorilla Glass for protection. It's vivid, and the viewing angles are quite good. Sunlight legibility could be an issue as we found ourselves hunting for the brightness control when outdoors. Below the screen is a fingerprint sensor, which Moto says has been elongated on the sides to allow better detection of gestures.

Moto Actions give users an alternative to the traditional three-button Android navigation scheme, in the form of gestures using the fingerprint sensor. This frees up some space on the screen for more content. You can swipe left on the fingerprint sensor to go back, swipe right to pull up the app switcher, and tap to go to the homescreen. You also have the option to long-press the fingerprint sensor to lock the phone. The learning curve is not as steep as we initially thought it would be, and we got used to this method fairly quickly.

To keep selfie lovers happy, the Moto Z2 Play has a 5-megapixel front camera with a dual-tone LED flash. There is a beautification mode which can help selfies look better. It looks like the Moto Z2 Play misses out on a notification LED, as we couldn’t find one. At the back, towards the bottom, there are multiple rows of contact points for the phone to interface with Mods. In the center of the top is the same large camera bump that we have seen in the rest of the Moto Z series, again because of the mods. The 12-megapixel primary camera's sensor has 1.4-micron pixels, and there's a dual-tone LED flash here as well. The lens has an f/1.7 aperture which should help capture better images in low light. Photos seemed to look quite good, but we’ll reserve our comments until we test the Moto Z2 Play thoroughly.